Nvidia launches its GeForce RTX 20-series SUPER mobile GPUs

In another move that suggests that gaming laptops will see some substantial changes this year, Nvidia has finally launched its GeForce RTX 20-series SUPER mobile GPUs. 

The lineup consists of the GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER, RTX 2070 SUPER, and their related Max-Q variants (the super thin version, basically). It's all in a bid to provide desktop style performance on the move. In both cases, the graphics cards have identical GPU core configurations to their bigger, desktop based siblings. The RTX 2080 SUPER (mobile) has 3,072 CUDA cores with the RTX 2070 SUPER (mobile) offering 2,560 CUDA cores. 

But what about clock speeds, you ask? Well, the GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER provides a base clock of 1,365MHz with a boost clock of 1,560MHz. That's alongside 14 Gbps memory - a small reduction compared to its desktop counterpart of 15.5 Gbps. The GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER Max-Q offers clocks of 1,080 MHz with an 80 W power envelope, compared to the standard RTX 2080 SUPER's power envelope of 150 W. 

For the RTX 2070 SUPER (mobile), the base clock is 1,140MHz with a boost clock of 1,380MHz. Expect the same memory speed as the RTX 2080 SUPER. Its Max-Q variant runs at 1,150MHz at 80 W. 

Nvidia is also introducing Dynamic Boost which is its power-balancer between the CPU and GPU. There's also Advanced Optimus, a superior version of its previous iGPU-dGPU switcher. Effectively, Nvidia is keen to enhance its GPUs in terms of features, as well as power. 

During the announcement, Nvidia used the time to reinforce the importance of DLSS 2.0 as mentioned last week, as well as highlighted what companies will be releasing laptops that use the new GPUs. These include Acer, Gigabyte, MSI, and Razer.

Interestingly, in various benchmarks, Nvidia compared performance to systems of about 3 years old, much like Intel has done so with its Comet Lake-H launch. We're guessing somewhere a market research study has found that people upgrade their gaming laptop every 3 years or so, but who knows. 

In benchmarks, Nvidia demonstrated that in professional contexts, the SUPER range will be immensely useful. The RTX 2080 SUPER achieved 59 frames per second in Adobe Premiere Pro with 3D rendering in Autodesk Arnold taking 2 minutes compared to a MacBook Pro 16's AMD Radeon 5500M and Intel Core i9 system. We'd prefer to see some less exact benchmarks but when does that ever happen during these announcements? 

Regardless, the SUPER range looks rather promising. It goes on sale from April 15th. Expect to see many high-end laptops embracing the tech and updating their ranges.